A high head pumped storage power plant rehabilitation project

This paper presents the development of hydraulic performance in a high head Francis pump-turbine runner which is adopted at pumped storage power plant. In order to achieve the improvements of turbine efficiency, pump efficiency and cavitation performance for turbine and pump mode throughout a wide operating range, a new runner was designed by the latest Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. The validity of the new design method was evaluated by the model performance tests and this model is going to be adopted the prototype pump-turbine plant “Ohira Pumped Storage Power Plant” for Kyushu Electric Power Co., Inc.. The total maximum pump head is 546m and maximum turbine output is 256MW. The results were confirmed that the optimized runner presented extremely better anti-cavitation and high efficiency performance at both operation modes compared with the existing design runner.